August 2008 Archives

Add BackType to the list of useful, free tools for monitoring social media (via IntelFusion). BackType, which launched this week, is a search engine for blog comments. The web site provides a convenient mechanism for finding comments by an individual or on a topic, with a social network-style "follow" feature and the now-standard RSS feeds for any search. This looks like a solid addition to the toolkit, useful for tracking your own mentions and for developing an understanding of interesting individuals.

Some ideas for first steps with BackType:

Search for comments about your company and products. Subscribe to the feeds.

Create an account with your usual handle and complete the profile. You want to give the right impression to people who search for your comments (and use the link to send them to your blog/site).

Develop a better understanding of individuals by searching for their comments. What blogs are they reading? What other topics do they find interesting? Influencer profiling is one application; hiring is another.

Follow a thought leader (subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be stealthy) to discover new sources.

It's unclear, so far, how thorough BackType's search is, but this looks like a tool with interesting possibilities, especially in source discovery and profiling. It's also a reminder that everything is searchable online, and your contributions in different venues will eventually be rolled up into one big profile.

18 September (Stockholm) - Twingly will present their analysis of blog coverage of the Swedish signal intelligence law (FRA) as part of a free seminar hosted by the Social Democrats. Reservations are required.

With the big project completed, I finally have time to start catching up on my reading pile, and the first book was a winner: Super Crunchers, by Yale Law professor Ian Ayres. If you're interested in analytics—and face it, you're reading this blog—you should read this one. Ayres looks at analytics across multiple fields, so virtually everyone will learn something. And if you hold strong opinions on the human vs. computer analysis question, the results in these other fields might challenge you.

The examples are all over the place: e-commerce recommendation systems, individualized offers and price discrimination, evidence-based medicine, social programs, dog racing. Example after example of how analytics create new opportunities and challenge the experts in the predicting game.

The nice thing about the book is that you don't need to understand any of the underlying technology going in. Ayres writes for a non-technical audience, and if it's entirely new to you, he won't leave you in the dust. Still, he's a law prof, so if you want documentation, you'll find plenty in the notes. Either way, I recommend reading it to the end, as he eventually switches from examples to explanation—and yes, he explores the risks to privacy and individual freedom, too.

Teaching the machine to readAnalyzing media content—online or otherwise—requires extracting meaning from unstructured text, and that's not in Super Crunchers. Text analytics are just a bit bleeding edge. For now, we can still argue about whether automated analysis is good enough to use. But the success of the algorithms against the experts in purchasing, sports, medicine and law suggests where text analysis is going.

As for the cross-pollination angle, a book this full of examples should be able to inspire some ideas in the reader, whether for your business or your career. For me, the big takeaway was the confirmation of my new favorite question.

When Delicious rolled out version 2.0, the part of the system that generates my link posts forgot the password. Before I fixed that, I found some posts that mentioned the Guide to Social Media Analysis, and I wanted to acknowledge them here.

Scientific American article on machine interpretation of data. Key takeaway: systems should build hypotheses and revise them as new data arrives. "The key to making all this work is programming the system so that it never confuses original data with a conclusion inferred from those data."

What's the old advice about not writing anything in email that you wouldn't want to appear on the front page of the newspaper? Why would anyone think a public, global communication channel is more private than email?

Major events create prime opportunities for social media analysis companies to show their stuff. The election coverage continues, but this week everyone's looking at the Olympic Games in Beijing. In keeping with the competitive spirit of the event, we've even had an analytic thumb-wrestling match (Cymfony vs. Collective Intellect).

A key component of listening to social media involves knowing where to listen. Monitoring blogs is an important step, but what if the real action around your company is in product reviews? Your listening plan needs to include the types of media that are relevant in your market. If you use an external social media analysis provider, they need to cover the relevant media types for you.

Last year, it was easy to assume that blog monitoring was social media analysis—the discussion was all about what consumers were saying on blogs. Almost all of the vendors tracked blogs, but there was a question about measuring blog comments. This year, things are different. New types of social media have emerged, and vendors have increased their coverage.

As I collected information for the new edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, I asked vendors specifically about the media types they cover in their monitoring or analysis. 58 companies answered the question. Here's a summary of their responses:

The second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis is finished and available on the Social Target web site. The new edition weighs in at 145 pages and includes more than double the profiles of the original. If you're ready to track social media discussions that are relevant to your business, this reference will help you find the tools and services that fit your needs.

If you're building an in-house social media capability—whether in an agency or corporate environment—your needs for social media monitoring and analysis are a bit different from other companies. The basics of collecting data and generating metrics and reports are the same, but hands-on workgroups have special requirements.

On some level, many social media analysis companies can help you build your own capabilities. The nearly ubiquitous interactive dashboard is a hands-on tool for clients who want to interact with the data, but they're a better fit for individual analysts. Some companies really focus on developing platforms for companies building their own capabilities.

What's differentOn top of the core analytical and reporting capabilities, social media analysis platforms for workgroups tend to include features like these:

Multi-user environment

User account management

Multi-client awareness (for agencies)

Delegation and tracking features

There's more, of course—especially when you get into the secret sauce that these companies cook up. Features vary wildly, and even the basic philosophies differ, but those are the basics that set workgroup platforms apart from the more numerous dashboards.

The other distinction is harder to see, because it's embedded in the business: these companies are oriented toward supporting in-house social media capabilities. Many dashboards, on the other hand, are a secondary service from companies whose clients typically want finished reports from their vendors.

The listVendors with monitoring and analysis platforms for the in-house social media team:

BarCampRDU was Saturday, and as usual, it was great for meeting bright and interesting people who don't live so far away (and yes, I wore the tweetworthy shirt). I get a small thrill out of my international conversations, but it's hard to beat the wandering conversations that happen in person. Just one ranged from mobile augmented reality systems and science classes for home schoolers to n-dimensional space and current theories about the shape of the universe. In keeping with the general tone of the day, I went with a more technical session this year, sharing some of the tools I use for manipulating and repurposing RSS feeds.

I'm not a programmer, but I do like playing with data, so tools that let me play without having to learn real programming skills are a big help. When it comes to RSS, these tools fit perfectly:

FeedBurnerBeyond the statistics that people usually like, FeedBurner is great for insulating your subscribers from behind-the-scenes changes. I've been using FeedBurner since the beginning of this blog, so when I moved it from Blogspot, I was able to make the change transparent to subscribers by having them on the FeedBurner feed instead of the blog's native feed.

Feed InformerFormerly FeedDigest, this is my workhorse tool for combining and reformatting feeds. When I moved the blog, I used FeedDigest to combine the old and new feeds until I had ten posts on the new site. Feed Informer is also my tool for adding blog feeds and Delicious tag feeds to web pages (for example, the entry page on net-savvy.com shows recent posts from two blogs, including excerpts stripped of their HTML). Delicious provides a similar capability with its link rolls feature, but Feed Informer gives more formatting flexibility with its ability to edit the HTML and pick up existing styles using CSS.

For the session, I made a quick and dirty dashboard that pulled BarCampRDU content from Google Blog Search, Flickr and Twitter, all using Feed Informer. If you know enough HTML to make a web page, Feed Informer gives you everything else you need to incorporate feeds into web sites. It has lots of output options, but for the non-programmer, the Javascript option is easiest.

DapperSimilar to Feed Informer in its ability to manipulate and repurpose feed content, Dapper can also pull content directly from web sites (yes, they talk about getting permission when you do this). It has different output options, including pre-built widgets and straight HTML, so it may be the tool for somewhat different scenarios. I haven't had time to play with Dapper yet, but it looks promising.

AideRSSFilter feeds based on what other people think of its contents. Comments, delicious tags and links contribute to a score that rates each post against others from the same feed. AideRSS creates new feeds with different levels of selectivity; its dashboard is also a quick way to see which posts of your own blog are being tagged, etc.

FeedBlitzRSS to email with visibility into subscribers and subscriber management.

What I didn't cover:

Yahoo PipesI talked with a few folks about presenting it, but they said it was really too complicated for my theme. The consensus was that Pipes benefits from a programmer mindset, and it's harder to use than the tools I showed.

Feeds from sites that don't offer feedsFeedwhip or Page2RSS monitor web sites and generate feeds of the changes. I'm sure there are a lot more, but how many do you need?

RSS In, RSS OutAll of these services take RSS as an input. The beauty of the feed manipulation sites is that they also offer RSS outputs, so you can build interesting applications by running feeds through several of them on the way to their destination. It's important to think about the order, though. Merging feeds and filtering the result with AideRSS gives a different result than merging filtered feeds from AideRSS.

From my perspective, the whole point of these services is that they're easy to use. If you know a little HTML and you're comfortable poking around at new software, you'll be able to use these in minutes. And if you build something cool based on what you picked up in this session—mention it in the comments so we can see it.

Translation on the fly?Speaking of working with RSS, has anyone found a solid solution for translating feeds yet? I subscribe to some blogs in languages I don't know, which can be a bit comical.

Update: Mloovi uses Google Translate to translate feeds (via RWW, TechCrunch). The free version includes ads, or you can pay to remove them. I'm giving it a try.